A black pall was cast over weightlifting less than six months ago when Thomas Bach, the IOC President and, in weightlifting parlance, president of the jury in this contest, said it had “a massive doping problem” and threw into doubt its Olympic status after 2020.

If that problem is deemed incurable this week, if Bach and his IOC colleagues push the red button rather than the white, weightlifting is heading for the graveyard of ex-Olympic sports alongside tug of war, croquet and live pigeon shooting.

If a cure can be found, the future holds much promise.

More Spanish-speaking, English-speaking and other nations challenging the old order in a clean sport; women’s programmes taking hold in those parts of the Islamic world where they have until now been forbidden; and innovations that make weightlifting a vibrant, popular, gender-equal twenty-first century sport.

Bach’s statement was based not just on the horrific number of weightlifting positives in the IOC’s retesting of samples from the 2008 and 2012 Olympic Games, nor the many more that blighted the 2015 World Championships, but a long list of cases going back decades.

Bach called for a “satisfactory” report from the International Weightlifting Federation (IWF) on how it intended to deal with doping in future, how it would kill off a culture that had its strongest roots in the old Soviet Bloc and has spread like a cancer.

That report was sent to the IOC at 4.15am last Wednesday by Attila Adamfi, the IWF’s director general who must have packed more than a year’s work into the 25 weeks since Bach’s statement.

The final amendments were made after the IWF Congress here in Anaheim last Monday, when the latest in a long line of changes to the sport were approved.

Outside voices had a large say in the process, as independent experts from Germany, Bach’s home nation, and North America were called in to sit on two special Commissions created by the IWF.

The main changes highlighted in the report sent by Adamfi focus on a new hardline approach to doping, including the handing over of the IWF’s anti-doping programme to an Independent Testing Authority.

Offenders in future will face Olympic exile, with bans potentially stretching to four years; athletes will compete, and be tested, more often under a new system of individual Olympic qualification; a closer watch will be kept on coaching and support personnel; and, crucially, progress will be monitored.

The IWF will focus largely on “less than a dozen high-risk countries where there is an entrenched culture of doping that goes beyond weightlifting,” said Tamas Ajan, who has been IWF president since 2000 and was secretary general for 24 years before then.

While they were not named they are mostly from the Russian-speaking world, though China and others can expect to come under close scrutiny too.

Nine nations, including high performers China, Kazakhstan and Russia, are banned for doping offences from the World Championships in Anaheim, which finish on Tuesday - the day when the IOC begins its two-day meeting in Lausanne.

The clean nations believe the dopers should have been banned before now because there has been such a weight of evidence against them for so long. Instead, they were often fined rather than banned.

“If they had been banned five years ago, it would have been five years with a different image of weightlifting,” said the Spanish Federation president, Constantino Iglesias.

He is right, but there is no denying that the changes approved last weekend are ground-breaking.

Away from doping, Spain is setting an example, as is the United States, in how the sport can better use social media to promote itself.

Spain’s busy and impressive media operation in Anaheim has featured live interviews, frequent updates on twitter, and a stream of short videos when their athletes perform – and the USA leads the way in popularity, with 69kg medallist Mattie Rogers having the biggest social media following in weightlifting at around half a million.

“A snatch or a clean and jerk can be shown in just a few seconds, perfect for social media,” said Phil Andrews, chief executive officer of USA Weightlifting.

Weightlifting is never going to match CrossFit as a social media hit, but the IWF is working on its output and more improvements are on the “to-do” list.

Another Spanish-speaking nation that sets an example is Colombia.

With a well-funded, well-structured development programme, Colombia pays its best athletes from the age of 15 and is producing so many good lifters that Pyrros Dimas, the triple Olympic champion who works for USAW, describes them as “a small China”.

The Colombians look good in colourful, well designed uniforms – coaches as well as athletes - they are not shy of wearing diamond ear studs, they always have a noisy following and they look as if they are having fun, which is great for the sport’s image.

South Korea and Japan, too, have sound structures, commendable results and high hopes for the future in a clean sport.

Another possible innovation the IWF is looking at is mixed events.

There was an interesting contest recently between Israel and Iceland, which has two athletes in Anaheim with 100,000-plus social media followings, thanks to their efforts in CrossFit.

Men and women competed at the same time, outdoors, alongside a CrossFit event, with performances measured by the Sinclair points system.

If there is to be more like this in future the IWF might need a more equitable points standard than Sinclair, which heavily favours the men.

The possibilities are endless provided weightlifting, which has been on the Olympic programme since 1920, gets the right verdict in Lausanne.

There is an overwhelming feeling in Anaheim, from just about everybody you speak to from all parts of the world, that it will, that it has surely done enough to convince the IOC.

Scott Blackmun, President of the US Olympic Committee, was impressed when he made a visit to the World Championships, saying the IWF had “shown some real mettle in making the decisions they’ve made”.

Blackmun also said the sport needs “to continue to show mettle going forward”, which perhaps suggests that if the IOC gives weightlifting the thumbs-up this week, it will be on a probationary basis.

That would do weightlifting, and the Olympic Games, just fine.

As Ajan said, if weightlifting is not on the programme the Olympic movement will have to adapt its motto of Citius, Altius, Fortius (Faster, Higher, Stronger).

“Weightlifting is the Fortius,” he said.